by debkaFile
It is feared that Israel’s passivity on matters of the highest concern to its security and international standing is becoming a permanent fixture of Netanyahu’s policy-making.
There was deep satisfaction in Cairo and Washington
over the warm smiles and cordial handshakes marking the ceremonial
handover of the Gazan administration from Hamas to the Fatah-dominated
Palestinian Authority on Monday, Oct. 2, after a decade of bitter
enmity.
Egypt, father of the reconciliation, and the United
States, were favorably impressed by the ecstatic welcome accorded
Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and his retinue of dozens of
high officials from Ramallah, when they crossed into the Gaza Strip
after passing through Israel.
Palestinian and Egyptian flags fluttered from
buildings and large photos of Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh el-Sisi
and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas bedecked the honking cars driving
slowly through Gaza City.
But US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy,
Jason Greenblatt, sounded a cautious note when he tweeted the next day:
“The US is watching developments closely with the aim of improving
humanitarian conditions in Gaza,” he said. “The United States stresses
that any Palestinian government must unambiguously and explicitly commit
to nonviolence, recognition of the State of Israel, acceptance of
previous agreements and obligations between the parties, and peaceful
negotiations.”
By this message, Greenblatt touched on the main the sticking points still ahead of Palestinian unity negotiations.
And so, while the festivities continued in the
streets of Gaza, the lead players closeted themselves behind tightly
closed doors to start thrashing them out.
American, Egyptian and Palestinian officials were exceptionally tight-lipped about the proceedings. However, DEBKAfile’s sources learned that the Hamas negotiators immediately slapped down the most explosive item in the path of the handover of government to the Palestinian Authority: the disposition of its military arm and large weapons arsenal.
Hamas presented a pre-prepared plan for resolving
the issue. Its military arm, Ezz e-din al-Qassam, would be seconded as a
separate entity to the Palestinian Authority’s security brigades. This
arrangement would grant Qassam a status partly modeled on that of the
Popular Mobilization Units – PMU, which has been attached to the Iraqi
army while taking its orders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.
In a word, Qassam would continue to serve Hamas as an autonomous army.
This plan was flatly rejected by Prime Minister
Hamdallah. But knew it was coming. A day earlier, our sources reveal,
Abbas and Egyptian Intelligence Minister, Gen. Khaled Fawzi, met in the
Jordanian capital Amman and agreed it was unacceptable.
The Palestinian leader implied as much in an interview Monday when he said: “We will never accept a entity like Hizballah in Gaza; nor allow any other nation to interfere in Palestinian affairs, barring Egypt.”
The first round of formal negotiations to bury the
hatchet between the two Palestinian factions therefore ended in a
standoff. Hamas leaders later complained they did not get the chance to
raise the most burning issue for them, which was the lifting of
sanctions the PA had imposed on the Gaza Strip. Its cutoff of funds to
Hamas keeps the population painfully short of such basic needs as
electricity.
The next round of talks is scheduled to take place next week in Cairo.
While Egypt and the US are powering the Palestinian
reconciliation process, Israel has no say. Behind the scenes, Israel
has been helpful with the technical arrangements. Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu, for instance, directed the IDF to allow the
delegation from Ramallah to pass through Israel and enter the Gaza Strip
through the Erez crossing, and return by the same route.
He also instructed government members to refrain
from commenting on the historic Fatah-Hamas get-together in
Gaza. Netanyahu explained in confidence that his policy is to hear
nothing, see nothing and say nothing on the subject because, at long
last, after years of frozen immobility, the Palestinians Authority has
finally roused itself and made some political move. While he does not
expect anything much to come of it, he would not want to give the
Americans or the Egyptians any cause to blame Israel for tripping it up.
This stance has raised some criticism, on the grounds that Israel can’t afford to stand by and hold silent, when new facts are being established against its interests and they may prove to be irreversible down the road.
While Cairo keeps Israel in the picture on the
state of negotiations between Ramallah and Gaza and the directions they
are taking, it is feared that Israel’s passivity on matters of the
highest concern to its security and international standing is becoming a
permanent fixture of Netanyahu’s policy-making. He adopted the same
non-interventional posture in the Syrian civil war.
DEBKAfile’s sources report that the complex Gaza
issue in relation to overall Israel policy has never been thoroughly
debated by the Netanyahu government, or even by the security and foreign
policy cabinet.
Source: https://www.debka.com/israel-hears-nothing-says-nothing-palestinian-love-fest-gaza/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment